“I’m right here” – Post-mortem

Finally i can show you the work  i did for the animated video clip “I’m right here” from Mr. Probz. while working with the talented animation studio Colorbleed. The video is about a man who tries to escape out of a coma after a car crash.

You can view the video here

The whole development of the animation was intense! It all started with the simple idea of a man experiencing the breakup of his relationship as a car crash, trowing him in a coma and trying to escape from his coma world. Looking back at the project, i’m amazed that we pulled it off. The video is dense, there is a lot in there. Maybe even too much, story wise. Due to time constrains there was little to no room for iteration. In total we had to make 77 shots and 3.5 minutes of animation! And only 2 months to have everything build, animated and rendered! O and did i mention that during that time they build a completely new rendering technique?! It a real testament to their expertise and skill that they pulled it off : )

My job was the usual concept-art, storyboarding and some initial art-direction. It all started with this pre-viz image i made to help secure funding:
After we got enough funding to get started, the scenario was refined and i started storyboarding:
A weird unexpected thing that happend during pre-production was the influence of detail on the overal experience of time in the edit. The timed animated edit with the simple, easily readable storyboard sketches worked really well. Once the shots were completely rendered the shots felt too fast! Because of the added amount of detail you needed more time to see what’s going on.
At this time there was no definitive character design, so the characters look a bit generic in these images.
Character design was partly done 2d, but since time was so scarce much of the refinement was done in 3d on the actual models.
Here are some of my early sketches, the style of the character was still undecided:

After the characters the overal color treatment was decided. I roughly painted over sketches (and later some screenshots) to create rough color keys. It all stayed rather dark in the beginning and moving to more intense saturated coma-world to end a a warm orange.

To help guide the lighting of the scenes i made mood paints:

 

At the end of the production i did some matte paintings (you’ll have to click on them, they are bit big..) The rendering style used in the video breaked-up everything into 3d brushstrokes. Hence the roughness in these images, since more detail would not be seen anyway.

I had a real blast painting that last one. In the video only a small part of the top right was visible but i had the luxury of extra time to paint the rest as well.I’m grateful to had the opportunity to work so closely on an animation production from the very start to the end. I learned a ton for sure!

You can view more cool animations by Colorbleed here: http://macncheese.nl

  • © 2016 Joeri Lefévre